Jacks Magic Beans (8 page)

AFTERWORD

Jack’s Magic Beans
started with the opening sentence.

Okay. Yes, I know that’s how all stories start, but in this case, that’s all I had—the opening sentence. I had no ideas about plot or characters or even a title. All I had was an opening sentence. I typed:
The lettuce started talking to Ben Mahoney halfway through his shift at Save-A-Lot.
Then I stared at the laptop. I had no idea what happened next. I had no idea who Ben Mahoney was or why the lettuce was speaking to him.

About six months later, my wife at the time (now ex-wife but we remain best friends), Cassandra, told me about a business associate who referred to Prozac as ‘magic beans’. I thought that was interesting. I mulled it over for an evening.

The next day, I knew what happened after the lettuce started talking.

What happened was this story.

I seem to write two kinds of stories. There are my serious books (such as
The Girl on the Glider, Ghoul, Dark Hollow
) and then there are my fun books (such as
The Conqueror Worms
and all of my zombie novels). Critics and fans may disagree with those classifications, but that’s okay. These are just personal terms. This is how I think of my work. Anyway, I’ve noticed that I tend to write a fun book immediately after finishing a serious one. With the exception of the opening sentence, I wrote
Jack’s Magic Beans
right after finishing
Ghoul
—and
Ghoul
was a novel that kicked my fucking ass on both a psychological and emotional level. It was a serious book. It was a hard book. It was probably—at that time—my most autobiographical work to date, and it was difficult to revisit some of the shit from my childhood and work it into my fiction. In short, it left me depressed.

Luckily,
Jack’s Magic Beans
worked like an anti-depressant—just like in the story. Writing this novella was a cure for the depression I felt after battling my way through
Ghoul
.

Jack’s Magic Beans
was originally supposed to be published by a small press. They never managed to get it into print (although they did publish a handful of promotional soft cover copies—I’ve never understood why they spent their money on promotional copies rather than just spending the same amount and publishing the actual book). When the contract expired and the book still wasn’t published, I got my rights back. Then I included the novella as the opening story in my now out-of-print short story collection Unhappy Endings. And now, Deadite Press have brought it back into print for everyone to enjoy. And that is my hope. That you enjoyed it, and enjoy my other books, as well. You keep reading them and I’ll keep writing them.

Brian Keene

January 2011

Without

You

I woke up this morning and shot myself twice.

Carolyn had already left for work. She’d tried waking me repeatedly, as she does every morning. It’s a game that has become an annoying ritual, much like the rest of my life.

The alarm went off for the first time at six. Like always, she was pressed up against me, and my morning hard on was wedged into her fat ass. She thinks that I still find her desirable, not realizing that every man in the world wakes up like that if he has a full bladder. Carolyn hasn’t turned me on in over ten years.

She lay there, as she does every morning, with the alarm blaring, snuggling tighter against me until I wanted to scream. Her breath stank. Her hair stank. She stank. I always shower before bed, as well as in the morning. She only showers in the morning.

I reached over her and hit the snooze button. Ten minutes later the scene replayed itself. This time she got up and stumbled off to the bathroom. Drifting in and out of sleep, I heard her singing along with Britney Spears on the radio. That’s something else that annoyed me. Here we were, both in our thirties, and she still insisted on listening to teenybopper pop music. I listened to talk radio mostly, but not Carolyn. She’d sing along with all that hip-hop shit.

It was enough to drive a man crazy.

After the shower, she walked into the bedroom, humming and dripping and babbling baby talk to me.

“Come on, my widdle poozie woozie, wakey wakey.”

I groaned, wanting to die right then and there.

“Did I tire you out last night,” she asked, as she ironed a skirt for work. “Am I too much for you?”

I mumbled an incoherent response, shuddering at thoughts of the previous evening’s acrobatics. She’d come three times. I had to envision my mother just to get it up, and still I had to fake an orgasm. Thank God for rubbers.

Twenty minutes later, I was still lying there and Carolyn was more insistent, warning me that I’d be late for work. I told her I was sick, and her smothering concern made me want to leap out of my skin. Thankfully, she’d been late for work, and I got off lucky with only a quick kiss and a promise to call me during her lunch break.

I heard the door shut. A minute later, I heard the Saturn cough to life. The Saturn that we still owed over six grand on, even though it was a piece of shit. The Saturn that we’d just
had
to have, because that’s what everybody else was driving. My S.U.V. had been bought for the same reason and we owed even more on it.

I rolled out of bed, walking through the house that we would be in debt for until our Sixties. I called into work, biting my lip to keep from arguing with Clarence when he questioned me. Twelve years I’d busted my ass for him. Twelve years of endless monotony, of heat and grime and boredom. Twelve years of ten-hour days with mandatory overtime, running a machine I was fated to operate until the soft haze of retirement. And after all of that, he had the fucking gall to suggest I was faking my illness?

My denial was short and terse. I hadn’t meant to call Clarence a fat bastard until it slipped through my clenched teeth.

After he fired me, I slammed the phone down into the cradle. Something warm dribbled down my chin. I tasted blood. I’d bitten through my lower lip. Wincing, I stumbled into the bathroom and watched the blood drip from my chin. One drop landed on my white undershirt. My stomach, bloated from too much cheap beer, seemed to take up most of my reflection. Two days worth of stubble covered my face. There were dark shadows under my eyes. Lines had formed in the past year.

I tore a wad of toilet paper from the dispenser and balled it against my lip. With my free hand, I fingered the growth on my face, trying to decide if it was worth my time to shave. Gray hair peppered my goatee.

The first tear took me by surprise.

I was thirty-five going on seventy. I owed a mountain of debt and had just lost my job. I was married to a woman who I hadn’t been in love with since shortly after high school. I had an ulcer, acid reflux, a receding hairline, and a bloody hole in my lip. My only friends were the other guys from work, and they were only my friends when I was buying the first round. I smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and dipped half a can of Skoal. Even now, a tumor was probably spiraling its way through my body.

More tears followed. I collapsed next to the toilet bowl, sobbing. Where had it all gone wrong? Carolyn and I had been so happy during our senior year. I had a terrific arm in football and a promising scholarship. The world was mine and I was God. I used to tremble after our lovemaking, which is what it was back then, not the obscene pantomime it had become now. I had loved her so much.

“Do you love me,” she used to ask me afterward. “Do you really love me?”

I always replied, “I’d die without you.”

Then Carolyn got pregnant halfway through our senior year and I kissed college goodbye. The baby was stillborn. We never tried again. I guess that was when I began the downward spiral.

The phone rang. I rose unsteadily, leaning on the sink for support. My head throbbed. The phone rang again, more insistent this time. It reminded me of Carolyn.

I gripped the receiver so hard that my knuckles turned white. Probably Clarence, calling back to berate me some more.

“Hello?”

There was a pause and a series of mechanical clicks. Then a female spoke, offering me a free appraisal for storm windows on the home I couldn’t afford.

“I’m not interested,” I said. “Put us on your do not call list.”

“Can I axe you why, sir?” It sounded like she was reading from a script.

“You can’t ‘axe’ me anything. You can ‘ask’ me if you’d like, but the answer is still fuck off!”

The telemarketer launched into a tirade then and I ripped the phone from the wall. I flung it across the room. It smashed into a lamp that Carolyn’s mother had given to us for our fifth wedding anniversary. I stared at the fragments, felt fresh blood running down my chin again, and sighed.

I’d been contemplating it for weeks, but it wasn’t until then that I decided to die.

I went to the gun cabinet. Inside were my hunting rifles, kept for a pastime that I didn’t enjoy, but that I had to partake in to be considered a normal guy. My hand was steady as I unlocked the case and selected the 30.06 and a box of shells. The bullets slid into the chamber with satisfying clicks. I sat down on the bed with the gun between my legs.

I had seen pictures online of failed suicide attempts. Cases where the poor slob had placed the gun against the side of his head and pulled the trigger, writhing in agony when the bullet traveled around his brain and left him alive. That was no good. I needed to do this the right way. I placed the barrel in my mouth, tasting the oil on the cold metal. I breathed through my nose, deep-throating the gun the way I’d done my Uncle’s shriveled pecker when I was nine. As the barrel touched the back of my throat, I gagged, just like back then. Tears streamed down my face.

I glanced at the wedding picture on the nightstand. There was me and Carolyn. Two smiling people. Happy. In love. Not the balding loser who sat here now or the fat cow the woman had turned into.

The woman who I had promised to love forever so long ago.

“I’d die without you,” I mumbled around the barrel.

Then I pulled the trigger.

The initial force jerked me backward. The gun barrel impaled the roof of my mouth. I felt it blast open my head and heard the wet slap of my brains hitting the wall, turning the ivory flowered wallpaper crimson. Grey chunks of brain matter and eggshell splinters of my fragmented skull embedded themselves in the drywall. My right eye dribbled down my face as my bladder and sphincter let loose, staining the bed sheets.

The pain stopped abruptly, as if someone had flicked a light switch. One moment I was writhing in agony and trying to scream around the gun. Then there was nothing.

But I was conscious.

I wasn’t dead. I’d fucked this up, too.

I pulled the trigger again. The second shot erased what was left of the top and back of my head. My face sagged down a few inches, making it hard to see clearly. Bits of skin and gristle dangled down my neck. The room stank of blood and shit and cordite.

The gunshots echoed throughout the house, drowning out my heavy breathing.

Letting the rifle slip from my numb fingers, I shuffled to the mirror and looked at the damage I’d inflicted. I had to shrug my shoulders a few times in order to get my face back up to eye level.

It wasn’t pretty.

I should have been dead, yet there I stood. I reached behind me, letting my fingers play across the gaping hole where my brain had been. There was nothing. No bald spot, no scalp, no skull. Nothing.

The phone rang again. It sounded muffled, thanks to my one remaining ear. After four rings, the answering machine clicked on.

“Hi, honey.” Carolyn. “I just wanted to see how you were feeling.”

“My headache is gone.” Laughing, I spat out a piece of myself. “I’ve cured the common headache.”

“Anyway,” she continued, “I’ve got to get back to work. See you when I get home. I love you.”

“I’d die without you.” My voice dripped with sarcasm.

Then it hit me—the reason that I was still alive.

So now I’m sitting here at the kitchen table, writing this while my insides dry on the bedroom wall. I’m almost free of this hell that is my life. Carolyn will be home soon, and I will fulfill the promise that I made to her so long ago.

***

The original version of this story appeared in my first short story collection,
No Rest For the Wicked
, which is long out-of-print. Several years ago, I revised the story considerably for a collection called
A Little Silver Book of Streetwise Stories
(which is also now out-of-print). I’ve always liked the idea, but hated the writing in the original—it was the amateur work of an author still struggling to find his voice. I like this version much better and am happy to share it with you here. The story was inspired by a late-night conversation with an old friend.